IoT in Health

At January’s Digital Research Forum, Dr. Haipeng Zhang and Dr. Peter Chai will discuss the deployment process and current research of IoT buttons at Brigham in order to capture publicly triggered restroom cleaning requests.

Ubiquitous hospital wireless networks create an opportunity for deployment of just in time notification systems through connected Internet of Things (IoT) devices. One IoT device, an easy, wirelessly-enabled push button (eg. an Amazon Dash button), can seamlessly integrate into existing hospital operations and provide an alternative method delivering just in time notifications while simultaneously logging the occurrence of key hospital tasks. An accompanying web-based interface allows users to program, and monitor the button system.

Zhang and Chai will also describe the use of the IoT button system to generate a digital log of housekeeping actions, and review up to date data on restroom alerts and how these techniques can be translated into other parallel processes within the hospital.

Featured Speakers

Haipeng (Mark) Zhang D.O. is the Medical Director of Digital Health Implementation at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Associate Program Director of the Clinical Informatics and Innovation Fellowship at Partners Healthcare and a Palliative Care consultant at Dana Farber Cancer Institute.

He completed an Internal Medicine residency and a chief year at Allegheny General Hospital. He is a graduate of the Harvard Interprofessional Palliative Care Fellowship, the first graduate of the Clinical Informatics and Innovation fellowship at Partners Healthcare, and completed a Masters Medical Science in Biomedical Informatics at Harvard Medical School.

Throughout his career, Mark has held an interest in leveraging technology to improve clinical medicine. He is the founder and co-creator of Palliative Care Fast Facts for iOS and Android mobile applications. This application is one of the most widely used mobile reference applications in palliative care in the world. He is the co-founder of Cake, a venture backed company focused on advance care planning.

He also founded and was the first president of AMIA Clinical Informatics Fellows (ACIF), the national organization for clinical informatics fellows.

Dr. Peter R Chai is an Emergency Medicine Physician and Medical Toxicologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School, and adjunct faculty at The Fenway Institute. He is a graduate of the Warren Alpert Medical School at Brown University where he also did his residency in Emergency Medicine. After completing his fellowship in medical toxicology at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, Dr. Chai has conducted research focused at the intersection of technology and health. His work centers around detection of changes in disease state and development of mobile interventions that respond to acute changes in illness. Active investigations include the use of digital pills to measure medication adherence in depression, post-operative pain, and in HIV Pre-exposure prophylaxis, mobile phone-based behavioral interventions that respond to real-time changes in health status detected by body sensors, music interventions to address pain and anxiety, and Internet of Things enabled buttons to improve operational efficiency in hospitals.

The goal of the Digital Research Forum is to facilitate a discussion around research and innovation in digital health within the Partners Network. We believe that peer collaboration and mentoring can put both the projects and individuals within the Partners Network at the cusp of healthcare innovation, in this rapidly growing and changing space. This can be the key to advancing digital research and innovation within the Partners network. We here at Brigham's Digital Innovation Hub want to make sure that Partners continues to be a world leader in digital innovation and research.